Arch Tory Timmy and the Conservative fetish for big government

It’s interesting to see that Timmy of The Times has been holding forth over on the ConservativeHome blog. He is arguing that although David Cameron is not a great leader, he can still win the next General Election and should not be ousted by the party’s MPs.

In his assessment, Timmy references a story hidden behind the same Times paywall where he will be shrinking to greatness, talks about the way Cameron has allowed the so-called centre right vote to be split:

Most of all, I hold Cameron responsible for the splitting of the centre right vote. Successful leaders spend 50% of their time looking after their existing voters and 50% reaching out to new voters. In recent months Cameron has scrambled back to a more balanced approach but the damage is already done. UKIP is booming in the polls and today’s FT reports (£) that they are about to broaden further – adding a low tax message (which seems completely unaffordable to me) to their existing core messages on Europe and immigration. UKIP, remember, don’t need to win a single seat in order to still deny Tory candidates victory in key marginals.

As you can see from the piece I have emphasised in bold, Timmy has his eye on the fusion between electoral appeal and economics. The piece in the Times that he refers to is summarised on ConHome’s main page as follows:

“The UK Independence party is to broaden its electoral message beyond its usual campaigns against Europe and immigration with a new tax strategy aimed squarely at swing voters in middle Britain. Godfrey Bloom, the party’s economics spokesman, wants to create a flat rate of income tax at 25 per cent with a personal allowance of £13,000, a policy which he accepts will bring particular benefits to middle earners. Meanwhile, in another attempt to chisel support away from the Conservatives, Mr Bloom also wants to allow non-working parents to transfer their tax allowance to a working spouse.”

Timmy’s big problem here is the same one that infests the Cameron Conservatives; the belief that the plans UKIP are putting forward are unaffordable because government has to spend so much money. It is this kind of lazy thinking, and the authoritarian bent that accompanies it, which is causing so much financial misery to ordinary people.

UKIP’s economic plan is entirely affordable – as long as the government stops spending money on non-essential services and provisions. But politicians of every stripe are in an arms race to make promises to voters that cannot be delivered without stealing ever greater sums of our money.

And when the consequences of a government’s irresponsible spending, unaffordable borrowing, increasing taxation and syphoning of our wealth to service its own ends become so serious they can no longer be hidden, we are presented with the ‘false choice’. Brandon Smith, writing on this from an American perspective on Zero Hedge, defines it superbly when he writes:

Large and corrupt governments love to use the magic of the false choice. For instance, “…it is better to sacrifice some of your money and your principles to the establishment than it is to live through total collapse of the nation…” This false choice process, though, never ends. The offending government will demand more property and more freedom from the citizenry everyday while constantly warning that if we do not submit, the alternative will be “far worse”.

The truth is, Cyprus is not the issue. What the disaster in Cyprus reflects, however, concerns us all. It is a moment of precedence; an action which sets the stage for the final destruction of the idea of private property. It dissolves one of the final barriers to total government control. Governments and elitists have always stolen from the public through misspent taxation and rampant inflation, but with Cyprus, we see a renewed feudalistic paradigm. The EU and the banking hierarchy are sending a message to the Western world: You are now their personal emergency fund, and nothing you own is actually yours anymore.

When an institution confiscates property and capital at will from a subdued and frightened populace without consent, they are essentially exploiting the labor of that populace. In any culture or language, this is called “slavery”.

The Tories, for all their pontificating about personal freedom and responsibility, are following this exact path, just as Labour and the Lib Dems would if they held ‘power’ exclusively. This is the disease that has infested the political class and will harm us all.

Where Timmy should be shouting from the rooftops that government should not be continuously expanding and over reaching and does not need to be so big or spend so much, he merely whimpers that leaving people to decide for themselves how their money is spent and how they use their resources, is unaffordable – for the government! How is that viewpoint reconcilable with someone who professes to want limited government and individual freedom? He clearly hasn’t got a bloody clue.

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2 Responses to “Arch Tory Timmy and the Conservative fetish for big government”

Again, well said! The problem is increasingly that those who work for a living are outnumbered by those who vote for a living. Not my original thought, I read it recently in a tweet. But whilst folks can vote for an easy life and “government” to take care of them, they will do so. And the politicos will do nothing to put at risk the vote of the freeloader

The Conservatives are cast in the form of chasing a middle ground, which is a Westminster bubble construct. It avoids talking about things which are of genuine broad interest such as immigration. So really they are a different package for the same thing as the Lib Dems and Labour and this involves big government.

They hint at doing some of the things that UKIP talk about, but it’s clear that they’ll never really do anything about them, because for one thing it would involve confronting the EU. People know they are bullshitting.

The Conservatives have to go. They don’t represent a coherent right wing point of view. They depend on tribal loyalty and they absorb and dissipate things like euroscepticism.

As for Cameron, getting rid of him has huge risks but keeping him will see a
further loss of support. On balance I think they are stuck with him, but it’s like being given a choice between being fed to a grizzly bear or fed to a polar bear.

I see Cameron as a representative of the ruling core as much as a leader who’s made things go in a certain direction, so it follows that there’s much more wrong with the Conservatives than Cameron and that dumping him wouldn’t change that much.

There’s no reasonable prospect of a Conservative win at the next GE and the best they can hope for is damage limitation, which is what the dangled conditional referendum was about.

Timmy is just a confused boy whose career is garbled commentary on a confused party.